A-Trak
March 2, 2012
Sutra
Last Friday A-Trak, who is also one half of Ducksauce (the duo behind the infamous “Barbara Streisand” song) made his first ever Sutra appearance. As much as people love to diss on the OC club scene, it seems as though every time I come back to Sutra I feel right at home. I hadn't made an appearance since my birthday in December and it was just the perfect amount of time to make it feel brand new again. When I heard A-Trak was going to be there on a Friday night, I couldn't resist gathering the troops and making a night of it.
]
We were fashionably late, so by the time
we arrived the madness and crowd outside had already died down. We
walked in just fine. The real craziness was waiting inside
as Kedd Cook was finishing his set to a full house. The music was sexy and
Kedd's hipster crowd had the perfect vibe for an A-Trak warm up. You
could just feel things were about to get real dirty, in a good EDM kind of way.
I was lucky enough to see the Canadian-born A-Trak tag team on the decks with Diplo at the Pre-Grammy's
surprise show in LA, but it had been a while since I had seen him
solo without Armand Van Helden (his Ducksauce counterpart). By the
time he got on stage around 12:30am the crowd was already “Breaking
a Sweat” as he played the new Skrillex song featuring the
surviving members of the Doors. Sweating from all the dancing, insane
amount of people or all the boozing going on I'm not sure, but it
probably was a combination of all three.
Right away A-Trak got into the groove
of the music and you could tell he was enjoying himself just as much
as we were. “I didn't really know what to expect. I couldn't place
Costa Mesa on a map before this, but I came here and it was packed,
everyone was going nuts and it was fun! I'd come back,” he shared
with me afterward. Nuts is an understatement. The crowd was raging so
hard I had to take a step back and remind myself I was at a club in
suburbia and not at an overcrowded music festival.
Critics Bias: An epic night with the
“Big Bad Wolf,” but where was “Barbara Streisand” and
A-Trak's styling signature hat?
The Crowd: Everyone and their mother
was there, literally. Including a wheel-chaired crowd surfer!
Overheard in the Crowd: “So effing
crowded all nite, I got every single one of my drinks spilled! Wtf.”
Random Notebook Dump: If you complain
about the crowd, lines to get in, over priced drinks and aren't
buying bottle service from the awesome promoters then you probably
shouldn't be going there anyway.
